Dreamspinner Press Years One & Two Greatest Hits

by J. M. Colail

  He caught the sound of hastening footsteps on hardwood, and then his mother was at the door, throwing it open and more or less suffocating him in a giant hug. “Jack!” she said exuberantly, sounding breathless. “Merry Christmas!”

  “Hi, Mom,” he managed to squeak out. His mother didn’t get like this often—just at Christmas. It was like she reverted to a kid during the holiday season, which was totally okay with him, since he tended to share her enthusiasm. “Merry Christmas to you, too. Um, this is Roz. She needs to use your bathroom.”

  “Oh, go right ahead, dear. We can make our formal introductions later. It’s just inside and to the left.” Flo pulled back from Jack’s chest and shot an appraising look at the man standing beside him. Jack could almost hear the blood rushing to Julian’s face. Damn, the man is adorable.

  “You must be Julian,” Flo said, a sparkle in her eyes. “I could just kiss you. In fact, I think I will.”

  Jack couldn’t decide whether to be amused or mortified, but he was fairly certain his mother didn’t care either way. She reached out and grabbed Julian’s face in both hands and planted a kiss on each cheek. “Um, hi,” Julian said, doing an uncanny impression of a stewed tomato. Jack grinned. At least he was capable of speech. Jack’s first girlfriend had squeaked in terror and hidden behind Jack all day. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Flo beckoned them inside, and as he and Julian bent to pick up the duffel bags, Julian hissed, “When did you tell her?”

  Jack shrugged, taking Roz’s stuff in one arm and a laundry basket full of presents in the other. “The day after I asked you.”

  He didn’t need to turn around to know that Julian’s mouth was hanging open like a stupid fish. “You came out to your mom on the phone?” he said in his best I-cannot-even-believe-the-nerve-of-you voice, only at about a quarter volume. “You are such a chicken shit!”

  Jack had told her on the phone. She had said, “Is that all?” and he’d sat there gaping like a frog until he remembered to tell her he was bringing guests for the holidays. “You’re just grumpy because I didn’t warn you I’d already told her. Suck it up and let’s get inside before it starts snowing in there.”

  Julian gave him a dark look, but followed him into the house anyway. Everything about the look said Jack would be hearing about this later, but everything about Julian said that Jack would like it, so he wasn’t worried.

  “I think I’ll put Roz in the upstairs bedroom,” his mother was saying from the kitchen. She still sounded overexcited, like she couldn’t quite get enough air. Jack felt guilty; he really should make more of an effort to visit more often. “I thought she’d appreciate having her own bathroom. I remember what it was like to be pregnant.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” Julian said, shooting a questioning glance at Jack, who shrugged. He hadn’t told his mother Roz was pregnant, but apparently his mother was even more perceptive than he’d thought.

  Flo came in from the kitchen with a tray of cookies that smelled delicious and four glasses of eggnog. “It’s the way she’s walking,” she explained, correctly interpreting their silence. “Oh, honestly, I did prenatal scans for twenty years. I know a pregnant woman when I see one.” Julian was starting to look a little spooked. Inwardly, Jack sighed. It was no wonder his mother had scared off so many of his high school sweethearts. Not that he wouldn’t have done it himself, eventually.

  Roz chose that moment to reappear from the bathroom, looking, Jack noted, distinctly relieved. “I’m sorry,” she said without a trace of her brother’s flush, holding out a hand. “I see you’ve already guessed the emergency. I’m Roz; this is my gender-undetermined fetus. It’s nice to meet you.” God, she was an awful lot like Julian. It was odd to think that they weren’t actually all that closely related. Nurture over nature, Jack guessed.

  “You can call me Flo, honey. Would you care for some gingerbread?”

  Jack tuned out their conversation and finished hanging his jacket, absently grabbing Roz’s and Julian’s as well, stuffing Julian’s outrageous spotted scarf into his sleeve. No one would ever conclude Julian was gay based on his wardrobe, he thought drily, but God forbid anyone ever conclude he was straight, either. He toed off his boots and left them drying on the rack, then joined the others around the coffee table.

  Domestic, he thought: two men, two women, cookies, beverages, polite conversation—but not conventional. He could do this. Letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, Jack slid an arm around Julian’s shoulders and settled down onto the couch beside him. Piece of cake.

  JACK AWOKE in the middle of the night, disoriented. At first he didn’t know where he was, and Julian’s presence didn’t clear much up. Then his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he remembered he was in the second guest bedroom in his mother’s house in Calgary, sleeping away the last few hours before Christmas morning with his…. Boyfriend was somehow too high school. Lover and partner were too serious, too committed, too much. Fuck buddy failed to adequately cover the bases. With his Julian, then. Whatever.

  He glanced at the clock and laid his head back down on the pillow again, blinking and trying to remember the strange dream he’d been having. It had been so odd. He vaguely remembered….

  Roz pushes an empty stroller down a deserted street in summertime, a blank expression on her face. In the harsh sunlight she looks like a bleached china doll, eyelashes too long, eyes too wide and unseeing.

  Jack shivered at the memory. Oh yeah. He was never going into a toy store with Julian again. If he never saw another one of those dolls, it’d be way too soon. He frowned. That hadn’t been the end of the dream. Something else had happened, something even stranger….

  Roz’s stroller squeaks slowly past a tableau of faceless people standing on a street corner. Further down the road, Julian stands in the middle of a shaded yard, his back to Jack, arms splayed at his sides. Robot is chained outside the gate, barking her head off but not making a sound. As Jack approaches, he can see that there is liquid dripping from Julian’s hands, running in thick rivulets and coalescing in puddles before soaking into the dry earth.

  Jack’s breath caught in his chest and he dug his knuckles into his eye sockets, hoping to distract himself, but it was too late. He remembered the rest of the dream.

  He comes around to Julian’s other side and stops dead, realizing where he is. The street has disappeared now, faded into the background. As far as the eye can see there are nothing but tombstones with dates but no names and graves that have been dug but not filled in. The holes go down all the way to the center of the universe, the fires of hell burning at the bottom.

  Julian says nothing. When Jack looks at him, he stumbles back a step in shock. Julian’s mouth is a black slash across his face, his eyes are hollow over sunken cheeks, unseeing. His hands are covered in blood. That’s what has been pooling on the ground; that is what has soaked the earth. Jack doesn’t know if it’s Julian’s or someone else’s. He tries to move forward to touch him, to help, but the ground lurches beneath his feet and he falls backward, into an open pit, he falls and he falls and he falls….

  Jack shivered and made an effort to steal some of the blankets back from Julian, who was about the worst blanket thief Jack had ever shared a bed with on a semi-regular basis. Then again, Jack hadn’t shared a bed with anyone on any kind of regular basis since his undergrad, so that wasn’t saying much.

  What a fucked-up dream. Jack wrestled away a few square feet of comforter and snuggled up to Julian’s back to get warm. There; that was better. He was already starting to relax; he could feel the tension drain out of him. Julian was fine. He was fine. Everyone was fine. The living proof was right there in front of him. Jack wormed a hand over Julian’s body and crawled it up his bare chest, letting it settle against the steady heartbeat. Nothing to worry about, he thought drowsily.

  Just a stupid dream.

  By the time he woke again, he’d forgotten all about it.

  JACK CAME to with a
heavy weight on his chest and a raging hard-on, neither of which was particularly comfortable. When he opened his eyes blearily the room was still mostly dark, but he could just make out the whites of Julian’s eyes, narrowed sleepily. That explained the weight, anyway.

  “Merry Christmas,” Julian said perfectly wickedly, and continued to rub his body against Jack’s in the way that was at the very least responsible for his erection, if not the actual cause of his awakening.

  “So it would appear,” Jack groaned, not bothering to resist the temptation to thrust his hips into Julian’s. “I thought you weren’t a morning person?”

  “I make special exceptions for Christmas and birthdays.” Julian turned his sinful mouth to Jack’s chest and started making very good friends with Jack’s nipple, laving it with the flat of his tongue before biting the little nub almost hard enough to cause pain. “I figure it’s early enough that we won’t get interrupted.”

  Oh, so that’s why he was up so early. “What?” he teased, “You’re afraid my mother won’t approve?”

  “Hey, being walked in on by parental units is distinctly unsexy. I’m just looking out for you.” Julian pinched the inside of his thigh. “Now, can I get on with what I was doing, or would you like to criticize some more?”

  Well, when you put it that way…. “Nope. Sorry. Don’t mind me. You just do your thing.”

  “It’s your thing I’m interested in.” A hand crept up his leg to cradle his balls just as Julian’s teeth scraped over his hip bone. “That’s not going to be a problem for you, is it?”

  Oh, Jack had no complaints. Nope. Definitely not. Julian could be as interested as he liked. In the meantime…. Jack reached down to tangle his fingers in Julian’s already perpetually messy curls and tugged him upward, capturing his mouth in a sloppy kiss. Julian rubbed against him provocatively, hands wandering shamelessly. Jack bit his lower lip, skimmed his fingertips down Julian’s body, raking his fingernails down his back. “Hmm,” he murmured as Julian started worming his way south again. “Hold that thought.” He half-sat, grabbed for Julian’s thighs and swung his body neatly around.

  “What are you—oh.” Julian’s hands gripped Jack’s knees as Jack dug his fingers into Julian’s hips and guided his prick into his mouth. “Oh. Hello to you, too,” Julian said, his cheeriness underwritten with a tone of definite manic lust. He rubbed his stubbled cheek against Jack’s thigh and reciprocated in kind, engulfing Jack’s shaft in one long swallow.

  Damn, the good doctor was good at that. Jack hummed in satisfaction around a solid mouthful of Julian’s dick and let his fingers wander backward over the perfect curve of his ass to nestle provocatively between his cheeks. He heard Julian’s rapid intake of breath and almost smirked in satisfaction before being rendered almost completely incoherent by the rasp of teeth across the crown. Oh, yeah. Julian was a biter, and Jack didn’t mind it at all. He would have sworn, but his mouth was busy doing other, more important things, like licking away the moisture leaking from the tip of Julian’s shaft. He thrust lazily into Julian’s mouth, tilting his head back as Julian began to do the same.

  Jack slid one hand around to cup Julian’s sac, rubbing his perineum with his fingertips. The cock in his mouth jerked against his tongue, and Jack felt his own swell sympathetically. Julian made an impossible noise, throat muscles contracting wildly, and he spasmed in Jack’s mouth, sharp taste flooding over Jack’s tongue. Unable to restrain himself, Jack thrust roughly a few more times before arching his back and spilling his seed into Julian’s throat.

  Julian released him slowly, and Jack watched in a lazy and bemused fashion as he stretched his body tight, then relaxed every muscle at once and nuzzled his face into Jack’s thigh. “Hmmm,” he said happily. He sounded completely blissed-out.

  Jack didn’t blame him. He wasn’t feeling any pain, himself. And, okay, it was completely adorable when Julian did that snuggly thing to his leg. “Merry Christmas to you, too,” he chuckled, sinking his teeth into Julian’s calf playfully.

  “You might make a morning person out of me yet,” Julian conceded. He wiggled around until he was lying more or less parallel to Jack instead of on top of him. “Time is it?”

  Jack didn’t need to look at the clock to know that, at least by Julian’s standards, it was still ungodly early. “Go back to sleep,” he recommended. Jack himself wouldn’t be able to—he just wasn’t programmed that way—but he wasn’t going to let that spoil the morning for Julian, even if he did get the impression that under normal Christmas circumstances he was a six o’clock riser. The doctor had clearly worn himself out just enough to justify going right back to sleep. He didn’t even bother turning around, just closed his eyes where he was and dropped off, bare-assed and dead to the world.

  Shaking his head, Jack sat up straight and wrangled some blankets around to preserve his modesty. Yeah, he could admit it, at least to himself when they were alone like this: The kid was adorable, and Jack doted on him shamelessly, and even if it made them both a little uncomfortable at times—on those rare occasions when the doting occurred in a safe but public forum, or the increasingly more frequent ones when it seemed too intimate at home—he wasn’t going to stop. He didn’t think he could stop. Julian was quirky, energetic, funny, gentle, kind, and, importantly, insatiable. He was crazy, or maybe he just drove Jack crazy, or maybe it was just that Jack was crazy about him. It didn’t really matter. The point was that Jack was starting to recognize how incredibly easy it would be to fall in love with him, and how little will he had to stop himself from doing so. It was terrifying, and exhilarating, and exasperating, but there it was. Jack was completely fucked, and he didn’t even care.

  Well, not much. There was the whole issue of the world thinking he was straight. The world continuing to think he was straight would be something of an issue. The Roz cover was only going to work for so long, and they all knew it.

  Belatedly, Jack realized he’d been staring at the sleeping Julian for a good three minutes without moving himself. With a sigh, he picked out a set of clothes from his duffel bag without really considering it and headed for the shower.

  “WELL, I’M stuffed,” Roz said cheerfully from across the table, leaning her head back against the wall behind her. “Where’s the pie?”

  Julian snorted beside him, and Jack felt his leg, which had been brushed up against Jack’s comfortably for most of dinner, sweep out as if to nudge Roz under the table. “That eating-for-two excuse is getting old.”

  “You did see your pie, right?” Jack asked. The latest in the long line of unutterably adorable things Julian had done so far this trip was bringing along the ingredients for an apple crumble pie, which he had promptly thrown together for tonight’s dessert. The smell could induce drooling at fifty paces.

  Apparently his mother agreed with him, because she emerged from the kitchen four seconds later carrying three pieces loaded with vanilla ice cream and plopped them down in front of the unsuspecting eaters. Jack’s stomach rebelled. He ignored it in favor of his taste buds and picked up his fork.

  An agonizing fifteen minutes of dessert consumption followed. Jack eventually pushed his plate away empty, stomach protesting at the extra sugar. He leaned back in his chair happily, stretching his legs out beneath the table.

  Julian made a happy noise beside him, nudging his foot under the table. Roz belched loudly, had the presence of mind to blush and excuse herself, then, when Jack’s mother just laughed at her indulgently—so long and loud that it ended in a coughing fit that had Julian patting her back awkwardly—pushed back from the table and unbuttoned the top button on her fly.

  Julian snickered. “Get used to it.”

  Roz shot him a betrayed look and aimed her foot at him under the table, but it connected with Jack’s shin instead. “Ow.”

  “Sorry.”

  At the head of the table, Flo made a contented sound, wiping away moisture from her eyes. Jack guessed it was more due to the energetic laughing than the wistful expre
ssion she wore. “You know, I always wanted a house full of kids. Your father and I just met at the wrong time for them. And now here I am, thirty years later, and I’ve got a bunch of eight-year-olds masquerading as adults at my table.”

  Jack felt the tips of his ears turning red, and Julian reached out beside him and laced their fingers together. When Jack chanced a look at him, he thought he saw a drop or two of extra moisture hiding in the corner of Julian’s eye, too, but he wasn’t going to call him on it. Instead, he just squeezed Julian’s hand and looked across at Roz. “So. Presents?”

  This normally required a bit of a soft touch, since Jack’s mom usually insisted that the dishes be washed before any presents could be unwrapped. Tonight, however, it looked like she was softened up enough already. “Oh, have it your way. I’ve made you children suffer long enough.” Flo shooed them over to the tree and pulled the ragged old Santa hat from the mantel as she went, turning to Roz and Julian. “Which one of you is the youngest?”

  Jack’s lip twitched as Roz and Julian exchanged glances. Instead of answering straightforwardly, they each wordlessly held out a fist and counted to three. Julian won the rock-paper-scissors match and Roz sighed. “I’m the youngest,” she said. “Technically.”

  Grinning, Jack snatched the hat from his mother and tugged it down over Roz’s ponytail. “Congratulations. You’ve just been nominated for Santa of the Year. Presents, please.”

  Roz just rolled her eyes at him, adjusted her hat jauntily to one side, and got busy under the tree, sorting presents into piles and handing them out accordingly. Jack noticed bemusedly that an extreme number of presents seemed to have her name on them, but then, that wasn’t surprising, since he and Julian had both spoiled her terribly. Roz was the sort of person it was just too easy to spoil—not that Julian’s own stack was anything to sniff at.